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Environmental Protection
THERE IS NO BETTER ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION THAN ANIMALS-1 Smt. Maneka Gandhi There is this belief that we look after animals that we should be kind to animals, that Maneka Gandhi looks after animals because she loves animals and that love becomes the important factor that we believe, people who look after animals are usually women who have nothing better to do. Soft hearted girls, this is something that people do when they are young, when they have to come out, when they grow up or when they become big men and they have industries and they have factories and they forget about all this. This love business is associated with weakness, with sentimentality and this belief that we look after them. There is no better environmental protection than animals. We do not look after them. Every single one of them looks after us. From the Tiger to the vulture to the cockroach to the butterfly to the earth warm, there is not one animal that is not there. I mean, in which way, does not impact well on our life? Let's take one example. When I was young my mother used to tell me the story about a king who could not be killed because he put his heart into the heart of a butterfly. When they kill the butterfly then only the king could be killed and it is quite; rue. My life and my son's life depend on that butterfly’s life. Why? Because butterfly pollinates flowers. If you don't have the butterfly you won't have the flowers and if you don’t have the flowers you won't have the insects that live on the flower. If you won't have the insects you won't have the birds that if you don’t have birds you don’t have the seeds that makes the forest; if you don’t make the forest you won't get rain and if you don't get the rain. Let us examine the different animals and what they do for us. Let us take the vulture. In North India, they used to keep stoning vultures. I remember one Member of Parliament told me very proudly that these vultures used to come and nest in his house and so they cut down all the trees and drove them away. This is how we hurt them away, we hit theme call them dirty and so now the vultures have disappeared. There are no vultures in North India. As a result single village has a crisis, a medical crisis because when earlier the animals used to die or when they are used to be a garbage the vulture would clean it off. Now there is nobody to clean it up and so the carcasses lie there completely putrefying and stinking. The green flies and the butterflies sit on it. They then sit on people and spread disease. So many villages that I have seen where they take the carcass of dead cow and throw it into the village pond, spreading disease to every single person who drinks from that, play in that and wash the clothes in that and why because one bird has finished there, one vulture has vanished there. Let us take the stray dog. We tend to believe that all the stray dogs are such a nuisance. What is the purpose of the dog? Why does he live in the city? Why has it come to city? Doesn't it like being with humans? Out of every 10 puppies that are born, 9 puppies will die under starvation, being hit, having their legs broken, and their mothers will be killed; will have nothing to feed on, so why do they live here? Because, they do the work of a scavenger. They keep your city clean. What is the important part of the city? Human beings produce garbage. We take that garbage and we throw it in the open; specially in India in every city what does this garbage do? It attracts rats- One pair of rat becomes 3300 rats every year. They are not scared of human beings as you know. But why do they live underground? Why do we not see them work commonly? Why do they not come on the surface? Because, they are scared of dogs and cats. If you have a dog, it patrols the city. Otherwise you would have rats taking over the entire place and now let me give you the case study of Surat. In Surat there was a commissioner who came and said "Oh! I am the new Commissioner, I want to clean the city" and whenever a new commissioner comes and says this in the paper, 1 always feel very frightened because he is going to do only 2 things. What does he mean by cleaning-the He is going to kill out the dogs and he is going to remove all the Beggars. Bus.... So this Commissioner did exactly that. He killed the dogs and removed the beggars and then he gave interviews to India Today. So, when as soon as he killed all the dogs and there wasn't a single .dog left, What happened do you remember? What happened in Surat, many of you were little children then, the Plague happened and how did the plague happen?. I will show you huge pictures that we took at that time. There were 1000's and 1000's of rats who were above board all over the city because there were no predators left. There is a balance here between the prey and predators and when we upset it by killing predators the prey get multiplied and that is how Sahara desert spread. A large part of the desert was forested. It had tigers and large cats in it. The Arabs destroyed it and thus the desert spread. This is something that has' been repeated again and again. It is very much part of our life. So the dog is here to serve the purpose-In Bombay for instance, they have decided to remove the dogs in 2 to 3 areas and they killed all the dogs. After all, for 50 years they were killing them until the High court, WHO showed them that this is the wrong way to do it. However in 2-3 colonies they killed the-dogs especially in outer Mumbai. What happened immediately? The pigs came, because nature provides clearance for the garbage as soon as the pigs came, they killed the pigs. Now there arc only rats left. Now who will kill the rats? So thus everything protects us. Let us look for instance at the cockroach. Now the cockroach is the worst possible example. No body likes cockroaches. You know the first reaction you have when-you see a cockroach "Mummy kill it, kill it, kill the cockroach", where the men and women run, but if we did not have the cockroach you and I would not be sitting in Chennai Today. We would not have a single city in India or the world. The human being produces very poisonous feces, urine, sweat. Even a little new born baby that is still suckling at its mother's breast, even this the nappy waste is extremely poisonous. Now when we have a bath, when we spit, when we go to the bathroom, all this comes out, through the sewage. Now and when it comes through the sewage it goes into water body and this goes into water body and now if it were to go into a water body untreated, within 15 minutes we would have no water body left because all the waste are so poisonous. As soon it goes into the sewage, the cockroach eats at and then the cockroaches' waste is totally biodegradable. The cockroaches' waste is harmless because he has been invented by mankind to clean up your filth and make it biodegradable. He is therefore invented for sewer. When you get into a kitchen it is not that the cockroach is coming there to say Hello to you all because he likes your face. If you leave filth in the kitchen sometimes you can't even see the filth you left. This poor chap comes out to clean up your filth and go back, or not go back if he is killed. Let's take every single thing, take the earthworm. If you let the earthworm work, your soil will never need fertilizer or pesticide. What we have done is we have killed the earthworm. We use pesticides so we use fertilizers and when we use fertilizers and pesticides we need 50 times more water. Electricity, so, you create a situation in which the farmer goes bankrupt in which Kamataka, Tamilnadu, U.P., Haryana, Punjab all fight with each other for water, only because you are using pesticide. Why are we using pesticide? Because you kill the earthworm. It brings us all back to the Gaya machine. Let us look into the Meat. The single biggest environmental crisis in India, Forget the cruelty that you cause, forget the fact that these animals are killed with great pain and suffering, and that pain and suffering becomes all part of our Meal. How are going, to suffer? Let us look at the economic side One goat eats two and half hectare of land before it is killed. This goat belongs to the people who do not have land because if they have land they do not grow goat, the; will grow soyabean. Now this goat and all his brother's and sister's, where do they feed? They feed only in two places i.e. what is known as free or common land belong to me and you which are important for our survival. They either feed in the jungle or they feed in on the hill side. Whenever the goat feeds he pulls out the roots: Goats don't feed like cows. When they pull out the grass it will never grow, again because the top soil-starts flying. There is no grass to keep the top soil it starts flying, and thus it creates pollution problem and Asthma etc., There will be no growth on the earth. Now when it destroys the hill part, all the little rivulets of the water may dry. So you have no water. When the goat goes into the jungle, they finish every little tree that is growing, every little bush that is growing. People cut trees for wood and for other things and on the other hand you have no more little trees growing because the goat has eaten it. So you have now forest cover less than 6% that is why sometimes you have the rain, sometimes you don't have the rain. We no longer have climates. We have weather conditions changing from day to day, because we have no regulatory mechanism. If you don't have forest you won't have rain. Dubai had monsoon in the past. They planted so may trees last year, they got their first monsoon. There is a simple correlation between trees and rain. That is part of gaya's regulatory mechanism. Now why do you not have forests? Because people are eating meat and have traded water for meat. Secondly every time you eat a goat, you have also eaten a tiger. When the goat is going to the forest, we did a study on who is killing tiger? Why are the leopards disappearing? Why are we losing this huge heritage of India? Why every single one of them is killed by goater. They are killed by the goater who has been frightened. So the first thing that the goater does he kills the goat. He puts poison into its stomach put it near the water hold and the tiger dies. Only after that skin and bones are sold. So, when you have eaten the meat, you have eaten the jungle, you have eaten the water, you have eaten the tiger, you have eaten all the animals which live in the jungle. If you do not believe, go to jungle in the morning, where these is National Park or Sanctuary. -You will see thousands of buffaloes, thousands of gout coming in and in the evening you will hear them coming out. The whole day they have destroyed everything that makes us alive. Look at any energy conversion. When you eat meat it takes 1 1 kilos of grain and cereals to make meat. When you eat that 1 kilo of meat you have eaten 1 1 Kilos of grains and cereals and not only that you eat raw meat by itself, so you eat onions and garlic ond this and that to make it, use oil,then you have chappatis with it-and then you want sambar, Dal because the meat by itself you cannot eat. So therefore in effect you have eaten upto 12 kilos of food at one meal. If that 12 kilos is available for a family they could have existed for a week. THERE IS NO BETTER ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION THAN ANIMALS-II In this country in so many families food is a problem. 37% of food is being grown only to feed meat animals. Not only we are feeding our meat animals, animals are grown for meat. Because of this Energy conversion ratio we are also growing soyabeans. In M.P. they have cut down all the forest for growing soyabeans and then you send the soyabean to Europe to feed the animals that are grown for meal there. Every 7th kilo of meat in Europe is made with Indian grain. We do not have enough for our people. But we will feed 'them' for meat. In this peculiar energy ratio this is what happened'. You lose water', and you create famine situation! You have to lose all animals because they are crowded out by goats and buffaloes which are artificially grown only to give you meat. That becomes your single environmental crisis. Leather has the same problem. We have so far taken 9000 crore rupees to clean the Ganges. We have not made a takka of difference. Not even takka Why? in spite of the fact that every body bathes in it, inspite of the fact that we throw dead body and everything in it. The Ganges still survives till it gets to Kanpur and when it gets to Kanpur it totally dies. Why it dies? The whole leather industry is sitting in Kanpur and what does it do? All the chemicals are thrown into the Ganges. The leather industry is the vicious industry. It uses the poorest of the poor to work with this obnoxious and dangerous chemical. They stand up to the waste, many of them die by many diseases. Nobody looks at what is happening to the laborer there. It throws all the residue into the river and there is not a single lift in it. When I was a Minister of Environment, I worked so hard to close down the sunlight industry. With Court Approval we closed it. Next morning it came back as moonlight industry. Why do they produce leather? They produce only because you wear it. We aspire for it. We have role models, our film stars come and say "I love leather bags, I must have matching and matching " and in that aspiration we destroyed water. 33% of the Indian population depends upon Ganges. The Ganges is a total mess. You and I are paying debt of Rs.9000 crores only because of leather. No country in the world is tanning leather except India. Why is that we are the single country that prides itself that we have got the biggest leather industry in the world? Everybody makes fun of us. We are stupid. We send this leather out. They use our tanned leather for making shoes, bags and again sell it back to India. We are the only people who suffer because everyone in the world knows how poisonous tanning leather is. Thus it is one of the important environment crisis when you misuse animals. First think what you should use. Every thing has a reaction. Why should you wear white clothes? White is the colour of purity. But white kills water. White requires bleach, bleach goes into the sewage, it immediately kills fish. When it kills the fish you have no cleaners of water, so white kills things. If you have soap that has phosphate in it, phosphate creates algae, which gets mosquitoes which gives malaria. So every single thing you wear has an impact. So 'first think what you should use and what you desire. Your desire kills the World. If we desire more and more, more and more money, more and more houses, marble, more cars, we desire to become richer and richer and show that richness, then nobody will survive. If you want marble in your house, there is a Hill in Rajasthan that will be cut down and all the forest will go. Every light bulb you use, every 60 watt bulb uses 400 kilos of coal a year to bum. In environmental term we have the term footprint. It means how big your footprint or how small it is is. If I want less, my foot print will be less. The smaller your footprint, the more valuable you are. If you want to own everything, you want jewels, marbles aspire for 50 dresses or going abroad, You know all this aspiration will create environmental problem. The more you want, larger will be the footprint. Every time you put your foot down you have destroyed the part of world- So look at you desire. Let me tell you a story. There was a crow. It had a piece of meat in it. It was flying in the air. All the crows were after it, under him, over him and finally he let the piece and all crows ran after the piece. He was alone and he felt that he had lost the piece of meat but he had gained the sky. The point is to realize that more you want, the less the earth gives you, the less you want, and the more the earth gives you. You should do practical things. You should work in the field. The -more you do, the more you will get. Why that Jain community is is the richest community in India, with the least number of people. Because they give, they do, they think and do not harm. Goodness and Ahimsa is the economically viable philosophy. Before I finish I will tell you a story. How one bird or one animal can change the whole universe. You know Mauritius is an island just off Africa. It had a bird called Dodo. The dodo was flightless. It cannot fly. Lots of Island birds cannot fly. The Island of Mauritious was one of the most well-off countries in the world. It had a tree called Calberia Major. It was the hardest wood at that time known to man. It was used to make ships. They used to sell it to people to make ships. Everybody there lived in wooden houses made by Calberia Majors. Everything was wonderful. Then the Portuguese struck...The Portuguese stayed there for few months as the weather was not fine. During their stay decided that they wonted to eat meat. They decided that they like the taste of Dodos, So they ate killed and killed the dodo till it was extinct and the Mauritians didn' -lsay anything because it was only a bird. If it dies does it make a difference? Now there were no dodos left. Within 2 years the Marutians realized they didn't not have the trees Calberia Major any more. Why was it so? On one side they were cutting and selling, no tree were growing at all in Mauritius and they had cut all the trees.They then found that the only way the Calberia Mojor tress would grow was, if seed is eaten by dodo and it passed through stomach it was ejected by the bird into the ground. They didn't have Dodo. So they went to many countries and took mainas, bulbuls and so many birds from India and China. Till today they are not able to produce. They had no source of income. So they became poor and they did not know what to do. Somebody suggested why you don’t start growing sugarcane. So they completely changed me economy and in the areas they had forest, they cut it down and they started growing sugarcane. No one was there to work in the field of sugarcane, cutting; turning into sugar and selling it. They got into a ship and came to India. They hired a lot of people from Bihar. They took the Biharians in ship to Mauritious and they asked them to work as laborers. Biharis were very strong, very aggressive men. So within a small period of time they have changed the language, the Mauritian language became "adda hihari". They started marrying Mauritian girls. So in a little while all the names were Hariharon, RamGhulam which were all Indian names. Their culture changed, their crop pattern changed. Their economy changed, everything changed, because they lost one bird i.e. how life works. Now in the North east we have hombill. Every Tribal, Pradhan believes that he is a rich hero only if he kills the bird and put the bills on his head. So we have seen so many people with a bill. We have found that pipul tree, the fibrous tree,grow only when the seed posses through this bird on the ground. So you should plan manually. You have lost plants of fibrous tree. You have used the bird as a moment rather than as nature intended to use it in the gaya machine. Everything has its place. Everything looks after the valueless object in the world i.e. human being. We have no values because we never give but only take. What we are-doing in this planet? May be have landed in this planet by mistake and remember while we are here protecting this earth and do good. Every single act of compassion, kindness and conservation brings rewards immediately. If a child has a pet dog or a cat his I.Q. increases by 15%. Dogs or cats look after you.